Norcross has a lot of festivals. They are all interesting, colorful, and enjoyable. My most recent visit was to the Irish Festival. I did not take my “big” camera, just my iPhone, and took just a few photos. As I was going through them one caught my attention. It showed musicians on the stage, but what I noticed was the “flaws”. I was seated in the front row, just off-center on the right. The stage was elevated. My angle of view caused perspective distortion, of course. I also managed to not hold the iPhone level – a common error for me. There is also a bit of pincushion distortion with the 6.9mm lens which made the bottom of the stage look bulging up in the middle. It really was that bit of distortion that bothered me the most.
Here is this photo “SOOC”, straight out of camera, but reduced for online use.
My goto photo editor is PaintShop Pro. The first thing I did was to use Effects – Distortion Effects – Lens Distortion. I left the centering at the defaults – no offset as I wanted to just do a little correction. The Setting was Fisheye (Spherical) and the Field of view 30. I set the edge color to black so I could illustrate the result here.
That came pretty close to making the stage look flat. Next I used the Perspective Correction Tool dragging the corners of the correction rectangle to the corners of the stage. That gave me this:
Now all I needed to do was a crop to get rid of the editing evidence.
Not too bad for a quick two-minute edit wouldn’t you agree?
.:. © 2025 Ludwig Keck